An English Spoken Academic Wordlist

This paper describes a project to develop an English spoken academic wordlist to complement the Academic Word List compiled by Coxhead in 1998. Syllabus designers consult learners' dictionaries when they are creating word lists for use in schools and colleges, and there is a fair degree of agreement at the most basic levels about which words are important and which words should be learnt. At more advanced levels, however, there is little interaction between syllabus designers and the designers oflearners' dictionaries. A succession of university word lists, culminating in the Academic Word List, have been largely ignored by dictionary designers, despite the fact that most users ofadvanced learners' dictionaries are working with academic texts of one sort or another. This paper describes the process of creating a further academic word list, using data from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, under development at the Universities of Warwick and Reading. It is argued that lists of this kind will be of value to learners studying in the medium of English, and to lexicographers producing reference materials for such learners.